User editing of SSI

Question

I am deploying Contribute CS3 for a small charity's website.
The member of staff who will update the website is sensible but not
web-savvy.
I want the staff member to be able to add new items into a
menu structure - but this will not be a frequent change.
My first thought was to set up the Menu as a template-based
htm file, and to pull it into each page using a Server Side Include
(SSI). This works fine, apart from the fact that Contribute offers
the illusion that it will allow edits to the included Menu text
from any of the pages that have the SSI. In fact, when the page is
Published, the included page is left unchanged - so technically,
this achieves what I want. But it doesn't seem very professional to
be installing a solution that behaves in such a misleading manner.
I hate training people to ignore what they are told on the screen.
Ideally, I want to be able to set a template-based page so
that it is editable in Contribute if opened directly, but not when
it forms part of a page as an SSI. I've searched and failed to find
anything - does this facility exist?
The only alternative I have come up with is to name the
included htm file with a non-htm extension (eg "includedText.abc")
and then to specify in Contribute that "abc" files are to be edited
using an alternative editor (eg nvu) . Just about viable but hardly
elegant!
Has anyone a better way?

Answer 1

Hi John,
If you can stomach using a .NET server, you might try using
Webstruxure's siteNav (
http://www.webstruxure.co.nz/sitenav/demo/).
It will give you your ideal scenario, with very easy editing in
Contribute, especially if the menu items are templated as repeating
editable regions.
One charity site that's using siteNav in this fashion is
http://www.aspire.org.uk/default.aspx.